Heat Wave Island / かげろう / Kagero (‘Heat Wave’, 1969)

Obscure Japanese Film #223

 

Nobuko Otowa

Produced by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, an independent company formed by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950, this crime drama was directed and co-written by Shindo and features Tonoyama in a supporting role as the head of an island village. Shindo’s long-term muse and mistress Nobuko Otowa plays Otoyo, a bar hostess who turns up dead at the beginning of the film when a dog carrying a human hand (an idea obviously nicked from Yojimbo) leads the cops to her corpse. Otowa, an actor always willing to do anything for her art, has to play a partially-excavated cadaver, but gets to pop up in flashbacks as a a living being throughout the rest of the movie. 

 

Rokko Toura

 

As the title suggests, it’s set during a heatwave, and a murder investigation is soon underway led by sweaty detectives Oishi (Oshima favourite Rokko Toura) and Iino (future director Juzo Itami), who have to traipse all over the islands of the Seto Inland Sea to interview sundry witnesses played by Shindo’s favourite character actors, including Jukichi Uno, Tanie Kitabayashi, Eitaro Ozawa and, of course, the aforementioned Taiji Tonoyoma. The dogged police begin to suspect that following Michiko (Masako Toyama), a young woman who worked at Otoyo’s bar, may lead them to the killer…

 

Masako Toyama

 

The little-known Masako Toyama, who has one of the principal roles here, was apparently a theatre actor whom Shindo had cast as a result of seeing her in a camera commercial. She had actually already made one film before this, a Shochiku action picture known in English as Pursuit of Murder: Shinjuku’s 25th Hour (1969), and she would go on to appear in at least nine more movies. IMDb has her listed (incorrectly I think) as Masako Tomiyama. 

 

Taiji Tonoyama

 

Anyway, the film is stylishly shot by cameraman Kiyomi Kuroda and has an interesting score by Hikaru Hayashi, although it’s one that works better in certain scenes than others, sometimes lending a strange feeling of detachment rather than enhancing the suspense. Both Kuroda and Hayashi had worked on Shindo’s best known films, Onibaba (1964) and Kuroneko (1968). 

 

Tanie Kitabayashi

 

What surprised me most about the film is how much it reminded me of Castle of Sand (1974), Yoshitaro Nomura’s big hit movie adaptation of Seicho Matsumoto’s 1961 novel of the same name. Heat Wave Island must surely have been an influence on that later film, right down to the permanently perspiring policemen. On the other hand, the plot of Heat Wave Island is also very much like something that Matsumoto might have written, and he was undoubtedly an influence on the original screenplay written by Shindo and Isao Seki (an assistant director on Onibaba and other Shindo films). 

 

Jukichi Uno

 

Unsurprisingly for Shindo, there’s also a leftist social commentary aspect to the film, as Joan Mellon pointed out in her 1975 book Voices from the Japanese Cinema:

Kagero has been highly praised by both [Donald] Richie and [Richard N.] Tucker. Its locale is again the Inland Sea, the same setting as The [Naked] Island [1960]. Ten years have elapsed and the people who might have been the heroes of the earlier film have moved to the cities. Lacking skills, they are absorbed inevitably into the lumpen proletariat as petty criminals, prostitutes and dealers in drugs. Richie holds that the film far transcends the level of melodrama:

From the brilliant opening it becomes apparent that he [Shindo] is making a statement on the relation between love and death; from other parts of the film (“cops are poor – criminals are poor: it is the poor chasing the poor”) it is apparent that a social statement is being made; finally, Shindo is making a film about what happens when sudden affluence reaches a simple people. 

The islands around the Seto Inland Sea, where poverty is high and employment low, certainly make for an interesting and often photogenic setting, as one of the cops muses at one point, saying,

The beauty of this scenery made them poor. The islands are beautiful because they’re made of granite soil. The soil can only grow wheat and potatoes. When it rains, the soil erodes and the fields wash into the sea. The beautiful white soil is a symbol of infertility. It’s a symbol of poverty. 

Heat Wave Island is a fascinating film even if the plot is arguably a little over-complicated and, though Otoyo seems a remarkably unsympathetic character at first, things turn out to be a lot less black and white as the story unfolds. 

 

Juzo Itami and Rokko Taura (centre)

 

Kirai Kirai Kirai / 嫌い嫌い嫌い / (‘Hate hate hate’, 1960)

 

Ichiro Sugai

 

Sojuro Shinkawa (Ichiro Sugai) is the elderly chairman of the Shinkawa conglomerate, a position which he was hoping his son, Sotaro (Kenji Sugawara), would succeed him in. However, Sotaro has rebelled and gone off to do his own thing, so Sojuro gathers the presidents of the six companies which make up the conglomerate and asks them each to select their most promising employee and send them to head office, where they will compete to marry his granddaughter, Kikuko (Atsuko Kindaichi), and the winner will be groomed to become the new chairman. 

 

Atsuko Kindaichi

 

The six men chosen run the gamut from the ultra masculine Nagaoka (Ryuichi Ishii) with his impressive chest hair to the effeminate Hirose (Kanji Matsumoto), who drinks only milk, a thermos of which he always carries with him. Other candidates include Sakurai (future director Juzo Itami), who used to be friends with Kikuko as a child, the handsome and modest Tsujimoto (Jiro Tamiya), who appears to be the favourite, and coal miner Fukumitsu (Gen Mitamura), who is conflicted due to his secret love for co-worker Sumiko (Junko Kano)…

 

Jiro Tamiya

 

This Daiei production was based on a novel entitled Hana no sarariman (‘The Flower Salaryman’) by Keita Genji (1912-85), a writer well-known for this type of material whose work also provided the basis for many other films including Masumura’s Blue Sky Maiden (1957) and The Most Valuable Wife (1959). 

 

Junko Kano

 

Sachiko Hidari

For me, the main appeal was that it provided a rare chance to see another film by Hiroshi Edagawa, whose Roses Bloom on The Rose Bush (1959) I liked so much. However, this one is less interesting as it’s basically a piece of fluff, albeit a well-made one which is not unentertaining. It’s an ensemble piece with no real star at the centre, although Jiro Tamiya and Junko Kano were both beginning to get popular at the time and Sachiko Hidari also appears prominently, although in a role that has little bearing on the story, while Kazuko Matsuo pops up singing the title song in a nightclub (to which you can listen on YouTube here). Even Bokuzen Hidari makes an appearance as one of the company presidents - which may well be the most untypical role he ever played. Anyway, for the most part, it's a pleasant enough time-passer, though the gay stereotyping of Kanji Matsumoto’s character is regrettable. 

 

Bokuzen Hidari

 

A note on the title:

Kirai can also be translated as ‘I hate it’, ‘I hate you’, etc, so the tag line on the Japanese posters should probably be read as ‘I hate him because he’s handsome! I hate him because he’s rich! I hate him because he has chest hair! Is that really true?’

 

Kazuko Matsuo

 Watched with dodgy subtitles. 

Sweet Secret / 甘い秘密 / Amai himitsu (1971)

Obscure Japanese Film #116

Tomomi Sato

Eitaro Ozawa

Yoko (Tomomi Sato) is a young woman living in Hokkaido who wants to be a writer. She persuades her husband to take her to Tokyo in order to visit Inamura (Eitaro Ozawa), an older writer she admires whom she hopes may help her find a publisher for her debut novel. Inamura is uncertain of her talent and non-committal, but makes a vague promise to read it properly when he has time. When pressed, he passes it on to a publisher friend, Isshiki (future director Juzo Itami), who happens to be present, and Yoko reluctantly returns to Hokkaido to await a response. However, within a couple of days she has left her husband and come to Tokyo permanently to pursue her literary ambitions. 

Juzo Itami

 

Yoko begins an affair with Isshiki, who arranges the publication of her novel. She then begins a second affair with Yamaji (Toshiyuki Hosokawa), the young artist who designs the cover for her book. Meanwhile, she is pursued by Akimoto (Hosei Komatsu), a cousin from Hokkaido with whom she has also had an affair. After Inamura’s wife (Yatsuko Tan’ami) dies suddenly, she begins a May-December romance with him and moves in with his family, much to the consternation of his daughter (Emi Shindo) and the maid (Kotoe Hatsui), although his son (Sho Miyashita) welcomes her, thinking it will relieve his father’s loneliness. However, Inamura gradually begins to suspect that Yoko is continuing to see other men behind his back, while she finds his possessiveness suffocating… 

Toshiyuki Hosokawa

 

Although distributed by Shochiku, this is (like the previously reviewed Wedding Day) an independent production by Kindai Eiga Kyokai, the company formed by director Kozaburo Yoshimura, screenwriter Kaneto Shindo and actor Taiji Tonoyama in 1950. Shindo’s screenplay is based on a series of stories written by Shusei Tokuda (1872-1943) about his relationship with the much younger writer Junko Yamada (1901-61), and it’s clear that Tokuda and Junko are the basis for the characters of Inamura and Yoko. In the film, the flighty and sometimes childish Yoko seems a highly unlikely writer, but it may be that her portrayal is close to the reality of Junko Yamada. According to Japanese Wikipedia, although she published more than 10 books and dozens of essays in magazines and newspapers, she was never taken seriously because of how she had been portrayed in Tokuda’s stories, and is remembered mainly as the subject of scandal rather than for her literary work. (Of course, it could be the case that this lack of attention from the critics was unfair). 

 

I was not entirely convinced by the casting of Tomomi Sato, who had previously played the stewardess in Goke, Body Snatcher from Hell (1968), surely one of the worst films I’ve ever seen. Her performance here is by no means terrible, but it lacks the subtlety and depth that Ayako Wakao might have brought to it. Sato had actually studied with the Haiyuza theatre company, which may have had something to do with her casting as the cast also includes two founding members of Haiyuza, Chieko Higashiyama and, in a rare leading role, Eitaro Ozawa. As a man old enough to know better but unable to control himself once his long-dormant passion has been revived, Ozawa is excellent. 

 

The music by Sei Ikeno flits back and forth between irritatingly repetitive bossa nova lounge muzak and some more effective brooding strings for the darker moments. The cinematography by Masamichi Sato, on the other hand, is consistently effective throughout and makes you glad that the film was not shot in colour. Sweet Secret was the penultimate film of Kozaburo Yoshimura, who lived until the year 2000, but whose ill health made working difficult for him in his later years. It’s clear that in this case he was working on a smaller budget than he had enjoyed in the past, and there’s also a sense that he was struggling to keep up with the times and attempting to make something more akin to a Yasuzo Masumura film (I suspect that Yoshimura might have preferred to make this a period drama and the idea of updating the story from the 1920s to contemporary Japan was likely a condition imposed by Shochiku, although it may have been Shindo's idea as he had previously adapted another Shusei Tokuda story as Stolen Pleasure for Daiei and given it a modern setting). In any case, it’s a decent effort of some interest, although not among the director’s strongest pictures. Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the film is its ambiguity – it could equally be interpreted as the story of a young woman who uses men to attain her ambitions or as being about men exploiting a young woman’s ambitions in order to gain sexual favours.

The film appears to have been shot in 1968, but not released until 1971.

Bonus trivia: The work of author Shusei Tokuda was adapted for the screen on a number of occasions, beginning in the 1920s with a few silent films now lost, followed by Kaneto Shindo’s Epitome (1953), Mikio Naruse’s Untamed (1957) and Yasuzo Masumura’s Stolen Pleasure (1962). Tokuda’s novel Rough Living (the basis for Untamed) exists in English translation.